Leo Strauss and the Noble Lie:
The Neo-Cons at War

byJohn G. Mason

A

s our Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld once noted in an off the cuff remark, strategic truths
sometimes need be defended by a “bodyguard of lies.”[i]
Here Rumsfeld was thinking no doubt of Churchill’s famous quip
defending Operation Fortitude, the mock invasion force aimed at Calais
that drew the attention of Herr Hitler and his high command away from
the Normandy beaches and hid the Allies’ operational plans in the
summer of 1944. Rumsfeld’s critics in Washington and London, however,
have in mind more the history of contemporary philosophy than the
history of WWII.

In the past few months, the
“bodyguard of lies” metaphor has been redeployed and used to
characterize the Bush Administration’s raw manipulation of the CIA and
other intelligence agencies for propaganda purposes and for the gross
deceit that seems to characterize the rationales put forward for their
Iraq policy. Of these there were many--WMDs, a suspected connection
between Saddam and Al Qaeda, or the humanitarian rescue of the Iraqi
people. They shifted depending on their intended audience and perhaps
the day of the week. The “imminent threat” of WMD’s were emphasized for
the British public while links to “Al Qaeda-like terrorism” were
stressed at home – where the fiction that Saddam was directly involved
in the September 2001 attacks has been firmly embraced by over two
thirds of the American public. As Olivier Roy rightly noted last May,
”Washington’s stated war goals were not logically coherent, and its
more intellectually compelling arguments were usually played down or
denied.”
[ii]

By the summer of 2003 - when
the hunt for banned Iraqi WMD’s had gone nowhere and the Al Qaeda
connection to Saddam had disappeared into thin air along with Saddam
and Osama themselves, the cumulative disappointment shook the official
rationale for the Anglo American invasion of Iraq. This placed Mr.
Rumsfeld and the civilian policy makers in his Pentagon group on the
defensive and set them up for the critics who had been waiting
impatiently in the wings during the short but triumphal march to
Baghdad. Secretary Rumsfeld’s credibility problems had now become
Blair’s and Bush’s nightmare—provoking a transatlantic media storm that
has touched the political establishments of the co-belligerents.

In London this affair has
mainly raised questions about the honesty of Mr. Blair and his press
and defense secretaries. In Washington it has done so as well, and the
prevailing view of the Administration’s war policy among its critics is
summed up succulently by the United for Peace slogan: “Bush
lies—Americans die.” But this affair has also a raised a related and
perhaps even more troubling question about the philosophical roots of
the ideology that’s driving the “counter-revolution” in foreign and
domestic policy within the Bush Administration. In short, the relation
between strategic disinformation and political truth has been very much
on our minds of late—along with some concerns about the lessons taught
by Leo Strauss to the brilliant group of his former students who now
occupy the seats of power in Washington

A Crisis of
Intelligence

Last May that Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia
gave the speech on the Senate floor
that marked the moment when Bush’s Iraq policy began to seriously
unravel. “The truth,” he said, “has a way of asserting itself despite
all attempts to obscure it. Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears
to this Senator that the American people have been lured into accepting
the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of
long-standing international law, under false premises.” He concluded,
“We just fought a war that didn’t need to be fought.”
And of course, Byrd assumes that
“unnecessary wars” can never be just. But if proven this charge
alone would constitute technical grounds for the impeachment of the
President for “high crimes and misdemeanours”—as Senator Bob Graham of
Florida pointed out last July.

The principal
false premise in question was the claim that Saddam possessed an
arsenal of chemical and biological terror weapons that was both
operational in March and an immediate threat to the security of the
United States, that is, an “imminent threat.” This is no small matter.
This was the central claim made by Colin Powell and Jack Straw at the
UN Security Council in order to justify the immediate use of military
force against the Iraqi regime. This was the claim that justified the
charges of disloyalty and unfaithfulness that put Jacques Chirac,
Gerhard Schroeder and Hans Blix on trial in the American and the British
media for three long months. And finally this was the claim that—along
with the baseless assertion that Saddam was a full partner with bin
Laden’s terrorists in the attacks on New York and Washington—finally
persuaded a reluctant and divided American public to rally behind their
President during the Second Iraq War. But since the invasion ended, as
we all know, these claims have been very much in doubt. Both on the
ground in Iraq where American weapons inspectors reported having found
nothing after a fruitless search for the missing chemical and nuclear
arsenal and in London and Washington where this “intelligence failure”
has become a major political scandal.

By June, the
“policy and intelligence fiasco” had triggered a flood of leaks from
the CIA, the DIA and the State Department as the battle between
Rumsfeld’s Neo-Con warriors in the Pentagon and the “realists” in
Powell’s State Department and the CIA broke into the public arena.[iii]
And it was revealed that last year our Secretary of Defence set up his
own in-house intelligence service, The Office of Special Plans
(nicknamed the “Cabal”) to compete with both the CIA and the DIA.
In the policy battles that raged throughout the summer and fall of 2002
within an administration deeply divided over its Iraq policy, this
Pentagon group won almost all of the policy fights and as we say, “got
their war on.”

But by this
pastSpring
retired intelligence officers from the CIA and senior diplomats from
the State department had begun to complain that Rumsfeld’s Pentagon“hot
garbage” from Iraqi defectors around Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress
directly to the White house in an exercise of “faith-based
intelligence” where the Pentagon knew beforehand “what they wanted the
intelligence to show.” They argued that the Neo-Conservative faction in
the Pentagon was guilty of “grossly manipulating” intelligence data in
order to shape public opinion. In the view of groups like “Veteran
Intelligence Agents for Sanity,” Rumsfeld’s decision to create his own
intelligence service with a “ stovepipe” leading directly to Oval
Office set the stage for “hyping” to the national media whatever
reports supported the Rumsfeld line on Iraq and eventually to passing
off forged documents like the infamous Niger uranium memo to the
highest levels of the Administration, to the U.S. Congress and
eventually to the UN Security Council. They said this to anyone who
would listen, and among those who did was Nicholas Kristof who put
their charges against the “Pentagon crazies” on the Op-Ed pages of
The New York Times—the main newspaper of the establishment
opposition.

The flap over
intelligence issues in the summer of 2003 immediately recalled to mind
the controversy over the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence
which had flared up in the Spring of 2002 with regard to Donald
Rumsfeld’s proposal to conduct orchestrated media campaigns to achieve
“strategic influence” with foreign public opinion. The manipulation of
intelligence reports was seen as but one piece of a broader campaign of
“information warfare”—where the Pentagon and British MOD jointly
managed media stories before and during the Iraq conflict in ways that
targeted the American and British domestic opinion. Sam Gardiner, a
retired Air Force Colonel and professor at the National War College,
analysed some fifty different stories in the U.S. and UK that were
planted in the press as part of a strategic information warfare
campaign to win public support for the war and to isolate and punish
opponents. We should note in passing that among the privileged targets
of this disinformation campaign were the French and German
governments—who were subjected to a mean spirited but very effective
campaign of disinformation which helped stoke public anger in the U.S.
against “Old Europe” and spark consumer and travel boycotts against
these two countries.

These
operations were carried out by the Pentagon “Office of Strategic
Influence” which after being announced in the Spring of 2002, was
dissolved—officially—in the Fall in the face of the public reaction
against the idea that the US Government would knowingly plant false
stories in the foreign press. But apparently the disinformation
campaign went ahead as planned even after the office was disbanded—only
with a different target audience in view. As Donald Rumsfeld remarked
in a November 2002 press conference: ”If you want to savage this thing,
fine, I’ll give you the corpse…but I’m gonna keep doing every
single thing that needs to be done and I have.” And we can be sure that
he did it with a smile.

In May 2003,
the charges that U.S. Intelligence had been politically compromised
were reinforced in by an inept attempt by Under-Secretary Wolfowitz to
downplay the importance of the missing WMDs when he told Vanity Fair
that the issue of Iraqi WMDs had been emphasised in the run-up to the
war only “for bureaucratic reasons. It was the one reason everyone
could agree on.” This effort at political damage control backfired and
in a matter of days, the issue of the missing WMDs went from being a
story told on the back pages to the lead article for Time,
Newsweek and US News and World Report.Newsweek for
example, gave the story to Michael Isikoff, their top investigative
reporter who had dogged the Clintons for years throughout the
Whitewater and Monicagate scandals. Clearly by this July, blood was in
the water and the media sharks were circling Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.

The next step
in the evolution of this affair followed from Seymour Hersh’s report in
the May 5th issue of The New Yorkerthat the
head of Rumsfeld disinformation operation was none other than one Adam
Shulsky, a “Straussian” conservative,” who had once co-authored an
article on Leo Strauss and role of deception in intelligence
operations. The significance of this link went beyond Strauss’ belief
that the inter-state relations were characterized by rivalries that
often dealt in the currency of deceit and deception. What cut to the
heart of the current affair was his belief, as William Pfaff put it,
“that the essential truths about society and history should be held by
an elite, and withheld from others who lack the fortitude to deal with
truth. Society, Strauss thought, needs consoling lies.”[iv]
This concept of the “consoling lie” became the journalistic key to how
and why the Office of Special Operations had in the words of one of its
staffers, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, carried off: what she
describes as “a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power
and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.”

Neo
Conservatives and the Strauss Connection

Hersh’s report gave the unfolding story of bureaucratic competition
and deception campaigns a new philosophical twist. Not content to
denounce a neo-conservative cabal for the disinformation campaign that
helped them sell the Iraq war to the Bush Administration, the Congress
and finally the American and British publics, critics now drew the
philosophical pedigree of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon group into the debate.
Quickly the members of the Cabal were dubbed the “Leo-Cons” in The
New York Times to highlight their connection to political
philosophy of Leo-Strauss—an émigré German professor of political
philosophy who had taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and
1960s.

Butother political
pedigrees have been suggested for this group. Michael Lind for instance
traced their roots back to the right wing Shactmanite faction of the
American Trotskyite movement who entered the Democratic Party in the
1960s and then split with the Left over the Vietnam War. Many members
of this group continued their rightward itinerary by rallying to
Senator Scoop Jackson’s campaign against the New Democrats. Some
finished with the Democratic Leadership Council, while others found a
home in the Reagan and now the Bush fils administrations. Other
critics who promote an “Iran-Contra bis” scenario for the
current flap over intelligence trace the group back to the policy cabal
that had promoted the Contra war against the Sandinistas and who had
lost their power and influence in the second Reagan Administration as a
result of the Iran-Contra hearings of the late 1980s.

But in the midst of the
growing press fury, it was the Straussian connection that stuck and the
one writer who appeared as the most reliable guide to whom critics and
journalists turned was Shadia B. Dury, the Canadian academic who had
published her Leo Strauss and the American Right in 1999. Long
quotes citing her as an authoritative source soon began to appear in
the progressive press. At the same time, conservative critics dismissed
her as a “liberal academic” who had “made a career of writing anti-Straussian
exposés,” and in particular, one self-declared Straussian, Robert
Locke, criticized her Leo-Strauss and the American Right
as a “snide, careless and inaccurate piece of liberal boilerplate.”
More to the point, Dury’s recent claims about the links between
Strauss, Straussians and Bush’s Foreign Policy have been rejected by
Mark Blitz, (Professor at Claremont’s McKenna College and former
Associate Director of the USUA under Reagan), because “Despite … Dury’s
bluster, she give no coherent reason why Strauss’ students in the Bush
Administration support the war in Iraq.[v]”
As we shall see, Strauss, the Straussians and their critics as well
have all been drawn into latest edition of America’s “culture wars” and
find themselves at the epicenter of a distinct media storm of their own
that has grown into an international affaire.

The
Neo-Con Network and the Strauss School

In
any case, Dury is quite right to point out that
many of the most visible Neo Conservative figures within the ranks of
the Bush Administration and among its house intellectuals who reside at
the American Enterprise Institute and write for the Weekly Standard,
have some kind of connection with Leo Strauss. Or if not with the
Master himself, then at least with his most visible disciple, Allan
Bloom, who taught at the University of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s.
Dury sums up her case about the Straussians connection to the Iraq war
plainly: ” Leo Strauss was a great believer in the efficacy and
usefulness of lies in politics. Public support for the Iraq war rested
on lies about Iraq posing an imminent threat to the United State. Now
that the lies have been exposed, Paul Wolfowitz and other in the war
party are denying that these were the real reasons for the war.” Paul
Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense, and one of the accused, freely
admits to having taken one course with Allan Bloom, but denounces the
whole idea of a Neo-Straussian cabal as “the product of fevered minds
who seem incapable of understanding that 9/11 changed a lot of things
and who search for a conspiracy theory to explain it.”

But whatever their relation
to the authentic thought of Strauss, the Straussians represent a
distinct generational cohort. Among their alumni are other Pentagon
officials, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, the Chair of the National
Defense Policy Board, Stephen Cambone, the Under Secretary of
Intelligence, Elliot Abrams of the National Security Council and Adam
Shulsky already mentioned. These are members of coherent
neo-conservative group of policy makers that have served together in
since the Reagan administration and who often socialize together as
well. And given their willingness to look out for one another’s
offspring, the network has a multi-generational dimension that passes
membership and ideological belief from father to son as is the case,
for instance, with Irving Kristol of Commentary who begat
William Kristol of theWeekly Standard.

As William Pfaff notes,
before the Straussians’ entry into their ranks, Republican
conservatives were distinguished mainly by their intellectual poverty,
and for that the brilliant “inverted Trotskyism” of the Straussians
provided a remedy. Today they represent a broad network that cuts
across the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party as well as a
distinct intellectual school that has colonized Political Science and
History departments as well as Law school faculties. The list of
Straussian students in an impressive one at least for their political
influence if not always for their intellectual coherence: Justice
Clarence Thomas: Robert Bork, Supreme Court nominee: Alan Keyes former
Assistant Secretary of State and Anti-Abortion Presidential candidate;
William Bennett, former Education Secretary; John Podhoretz, the former
New York Post Editorialist, and John T. Agresto, former National
Endowment for the Humanities Deputy Chair, among others. They represent
the warrior elite of the Intellectual Right of the Reagan era who
especially distinguished themselves in their service in the long but
ultimately failed campaign to hunt down President Clinton in the 1990s
and thereby to reverse the cultural settlement of the post 1960s. In
the wake of 9/11, many were called out of retirement to rally the
country behind the “War on Terrorism” and do battle in the media with
the “Blame America first crowd” among liberal academics.

All and all then, the
Straussians are an exceptional intellectual and social movement. As
Karl Jahn observes: “The greatest peculiarity of Straussianism is that
there is such a thing. Not a single other “conservative thinker” has
inspired a following remotely comparable, in size, continuity and
influence to that of Leo Strauss. There is a Straussian School as there
is no Weaverian or Burnhamite or Meryeran or Kendallist school. And
this school has its own interest, ideas and purposes, which are clearly
distinct from mainstream conservatism.”

But their influence is
especially strong in the right wing policy think tanks in
Washington—most notably the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)—set up
by conservative foundations such as the Lynde and Harry Braddley
Foundation. President Bush saluted the AEI as the home to “twenty of
the best minds” in his administration, and it was their annual dinner
in February 2003 that he give his clearest defense of his invasion of
Iraq. Echoing the Wolfowitz argument for regime change in Iraq as the
key to regional transformation, Bush declared that the liberation of
Iraq was about bringing democracy to an entire region and Islam into
the modern world. The audience at the American Enterprise Institute was
understandably thrilled because his speech meant that the “Richard
Perle School” had won its battle for the President’s heart and mind at
least for the duration of the war. Radiating the sublime self-certainty
that can only come from the place where evangelical faith meets worldly
inexperience, our Warrior President committed us to making over not
just one Arab dictatorship but all of them at once.

The importance of this
speech then was as much about where it was said as what was said. The
AEI is the Washington think tank that housed most of the strategic
thinkers—Perle, Donnelly, Muravchik, and others—who lead the charge for
war with Iraq during their years of exile under Clinton. Home base for
the “Project for a New American Century,” whose authors dominate
decision-making at the Bush Pentagon, this group has also been
instrumental in aligning the administration’s Mid East policy with that
of Ariel Sharon’s Likud. In the view of many critics the political
kinship with Likud is as or more important than any lingering
association with Leo Strauss for explaining the Neo-Conservative
worldview.

In the reigning
neo-conservative view, then, the Iraq war was a “a bold and daring
project” to reshape the map of the Middle East by applying the “shock
and awe” of battle to break down barriers to westernization—as though
western armies from Napoleon to Dayan hadn’t already tried the
application of brute force in 1799, 1918, 1956, and 1967. But for the
Neo-con theorists, warfare remains the preferred means for
administering shock therapy to the Mid East. In the event, things have
turned out somewhat differently than expected. Conquering Iraq proved
easier than occupying it, and far from breaking Islamist morale, the
Bush conquest has instead turned Iraq into a magnet for violence
attracting every available fedayin in the Middle East.

But the Iraq project is
questionable on other grounds than its sheer political naiveté, for if
we are to believe Shadia Dury, the Neo-Khans’ preference for
belligerence is as much philosophical as it is political and has less to
do with the defense of liberal democracy than some might think. She
argues that we should treat Neo-Conservative enthusiasm for the spread
of democracy with great skepticism because: “The idea that Strauss was
a great defender of democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss
disciples consider it a noble lie. Yet many in the media have been
gullible enough to believe it. How could an admirer of Plato and
Nietzsche be a Liberal democrat? The ancient philosophers whom Strauss
most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for
either truth or liberty.”

In explaining the real
appeal of “Shock and Awe” demonstrations of military force, Dury points
out that like Karl Schmidt, Strauss believed firmly that politics and
the State are rooted in the maintenance of the “Friend/Foe”
distinction. As she argues in her interview with Postel, for Strauss,

The
global reach of American [mass] culture threatened to trivialize
life and turn it into entertainment. This is as terrifying as a
specter for Strauss as it was for Alexandre Kojève and Carl
Schmidt… All three of them were convinced that liberal economics
...destroys politics; all three understood politics as a conflict
between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to
the death… In short, they all thought that man’s humanity
depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and
headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern
project with its emphasis on self- preservation and creature
comforts. [Through war] Life can be politicized once more, and
man’s humanity can be restored. This terrifying vision fits
perfectly well with the desire for honor and glory that the
neo-conservative gentlemen covet. The combination of religion and
nationalism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to
turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists
willing to fight and die for their God and country. I never
imagined when I wrote my first book on Strauss that the
unscrupulous elite that he celebrates would ever come so close to
political power… But fear is the greatest ally of tyranny.[vi]

In other words, Dury claims
that Strauss believes that Men by their nature are inherently
aggressive and can only restrained by a powerful nationalist state.
“Because mankind is intrinsically wicked,” Strauss once wrote, “ he has
to be governed. Such governance can only be established, however, when
men are united – and they can only be united against other people.” And
Dury adds that this means: “ If no external threat exists then one has
to be manufactured.” Heroic values are required for the accomplishment
of this struggle and for this the egoism and utilitarianism of modern
liberalism is both an inadequate and unworthy foundation. Apparently
this was shown to Strauss’s satisfaction by the utter failure of Weimar
Republic to resist the rise of Hitler. In his view, Weimar’s fate is
the doom of all liberal democracies given enough time.

For Straussians like Mark
Blitz, however, the American Republic has a unique chance of escaping
this fate precisely because of its cultural and political
“exceptionalism”—that is, because American political culture retained
many pre-modern and illiberal cultural elements that have been lost in
the rest of the modern world. Writing from a safe distance in Paris,
Carole Widmaier in Paris defends Strauss from his disciples’
nationalist excesses; denouncing their americano-centric, “point de vue
absolutisé d’une nation ou d’une culture particulière… Il est moins
grec que barbare.”
And citing Strauss’ maxim that “ le barbare étant défini comme celui
qui croit que ‘toutes les questions ont été résolues par son propre
tradition ancestrale,’
“Widmaier condemns the Straussians that have come to power in America
as much for their barbarism as having reduced Strauss’ esoteric
philosophy to vulgar ideology.

After listening her defense
of Strauss’s critique of tyranny grounded in a close reading of his
texts, one can imagine Leo Strauss repeating after Karl Marx, “Quant
à moi, je ne suis pas Straussian.”
But then again, perhaps, Leo Strauss’ attitude toward American power in
world was not so distant from that of his unilateralist disciples as
Widmaier would have us believe, and certainly no less “heroic” in its
potential imperial applications. Dury states that whenever he discussed
contemporary international relations, Strauss was fond of repeating the
story of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. And more precisely of how:
“When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including
the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but
the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of
disrespect.” An apt image, then, for an American Gulliver today who
shows strong exhibitionist tendencies and whose militarist urges push
him to play the “pompier pyromane” around the world while “Old
Europe” looks on in disbelief.

The Straussian Neo-Cons,
then adopt a peculiar stance in the “Quarrel of the Ancients with the
Moderns.” Essentially they argue that modern liberals are myopic dwarfs
who actually have nowhere to stand philosophically – and certainly not
on any ancient giants’ shoulders. For the Straussians modernity since
Machiavelli has been a straight path to nihilism where all
understanding of political virtue has been lost along with respect for
a social hierarchy rooted in aristocratic values. To rediscover
Virtue’s true meaning, they argue we must return to the classical
schoolroom and the pagan philosophers where moral teaching began - but
this is a path is only open to a select few. For the rest of us, a
return to organized religion, what Strauss called a “pious fraud,”
along with uplifting patriotic fables, are our only hope of avoiding
the fall into total anomie. Given their rejection of modernity, it’s
not surprising that Straussians should endorse a religious faith they
don’t share as a necessary fiction needed to maintain good order among
the masses. It is perhaps from this that comes the embrace of the
Evangelical Christian Right by secular intellectual Jews as political
allies within the Republican Party and of “Christian Zionists” by their
Likud friends from Israel.

Dury work forces us to ask
what qualifications if any the Neo-Straussians have for undertaking the
democratic modernization of the Mid-East as a “generational
project”—given their own skepticism about democracy and liberal
modernity as a political projects. “They really have no use for
liberalism and democracy, “Dury remarks,” but they’re conquering the
world in their name…” This suggests that the Neo-Cons are something
more complicated than the Wilsoniens bottés that Pierre Hassner
has dubbed them. They’re too wedded to a radical critique of liberal
modernity and to their alliances with Protestant fundamentalists
Ayatollahs to be considered reliable friends of democracy in the Middle
East or indeed anywhere else – and most especially at home.

In helping us pose these
political questions, Shadia Dury may sometimes slip into a partisan,
polemical mode—as her critics suggest—but perhaps we might forgive her
blunt Canadian way of speaking. In America, the Neo-Cons and the
Religious Right are winning our culture wars, and the hour is already
late. Liberal democrats in North America no longer have the time or the
luxury of arguing the other side’s position better than their
opponents. Indeed, they must first understand their own position and
argue it without reservation. This is something at least that Shadia
Dury does not hesitate to do.

[ii]
On the conflict between the official diplomatic line and real
strategic rationale for the invasion see Olivier Roy’s Op-Ed
column, “Europe will not be fooled again, “The New York Times,
May 13, 2003.

John
G. Mason
is Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University
and has been a Visiting Professor (Professeur Invité) at l’Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 2001 and at
l’Université de Paris VIII in 2002 and 2003. He is a regular
contributor to
Esprit in Paris and Tribune in London. This article first
appeared in French translation in Critique, March 2004.